Unless you’re talking about a small child tugging on their parent’s pant leg for attention, “pulling someone’s leg” most often refers to joking around. You may wonder how we landed on “pulling” and “legs” instead of “stretching someone’s arm” or “tugging on someone’s toes,” and while there are several theories as to how the phrase came to be, none is definitive.
Here’s what we do know — the idea of pulling a person’s leg (in the idiomatic sense) can be traced back to around the mid-19th century. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an early printed example in the 1852 book Arctic Miscellanies. But while we have this evidence of the phrase in use by the 1850s, we lack a clear understanding of why.
One theory posed by the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms is that it’s “thought to allude to tripping someone by so holding a stick or other object that one of his legs is pulled back,” with the idea that the act would throw that person into a state of disarray or confusion. Another theory is that thieves in Victorian England would pull at the legs of passersby to trip and disorient them, after which the thieves would run off with their loot. Similarly, a third theory posits that the idiom refers to beggars tugging at the pant legs of passersby to get their attention on the street, after which they’d trick the person into giving them money.
There’s an additional (and relatively morbid) theory that many linguists mention, which is thathe idiom may be derived from public hangings in London, where executioners would sometimes pull at the condemned’s legs to hasten their execution. A dark practice to be sure, especially given the phrase’s lighthearted meaning today.
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